An Australian, a Tibetan and a Scot walk into a boarding house in Delhi. This is not the start of a joke, but the premise of Meaghan Delahunt's second novel. The three each walk into the house at different times, but coincidence - or is it destiny? - brings them together in different parts of India: Dharamsala, at a Buddhist monastery; Bhopal, on the 20th anniversary of the Union Carbide gas disaster; and on a bus from Agra to Jaipur. Each of the characters carries some personal baggage: Francoise, the Australian photographer, has just left a long-term relationship; Arkay, the Scot, is battling alcoholism; Naga, the Tibetan, was forced as a child to flee his home and become a refugee, and later lost his family to the gas leak in Bhopal.

There is much rich material here, though Delahunt is conscious of the pitfalls awaiting a "westerner" writing about India. Francoise, during her first days in Delhi, asserts: "Most days I tried to avoid the obvious ... the visual clichés of Modern India. They were hard to avoid." Surjit, the Sikh she is staying with, tells her that foreigners only come to India to record its disasters and fall in love with a monk or sherpa. She protests - and then proceeds to work on a project about Bhopal and fall in love with a monk. Delahunt's strategy for dealing with the clichés is to show she is aware of them, and then to give the particulars of the story enough complexity to rise above them.

This works when she is telling the story of Francoise's love for Arkay, the monk. Their relationship is written with intensity and powerful despair - and Arkay the Scottish alcoholic is so far from the stereotype of a monk that cliché is subverted even as it looms.

But the same can't be said for the story of Francoise and Naga in Bhopal. Indra Sinha's Booker-shortlisted Animal's People, also set in Bhopal 20 years after the disaster, so deeply inhabits the lives of those who were marked by it that it would be difficult for most writers to enter that territory without suffering by comparison. Even so, there's no reason why Naga shouldn't be an effective guide to the story of Bhopal. As a boy, he was filled with rage towards the world; when the gas leak killed his parents, that rage had every reason to express itself. Naga turned to the monastic life to find a way out of rage, only to discover after 20 years that he must confront it again as he watches his sister die. That could have been the novel's most powerful thread, but instead it is the most lifeless. We see Naga as an angry, gutsy boy - and then as a monk who regards the world with the equanimity of the enlightened. The in-between stage of his life is entirely absent.

The novel is at its best when it steps into Francoise's drifting life and the tortured existence of Arkay as he tries desperately to replace alcohol with spirituality. The stories of India's politics, industrial disasters and Tibetan refugees, which should have been hugely interesting, fail to come to life - it is the westerners seeking to find or lose themselves in India who give the novel its heart. If only Delahunt had embraced the clichés more completely.